Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (5 page)

Reinhardt served as deputy finance minister from 1933 to 1945. A diligent worker with vast specialized knowledge, he expounded his political goals in hundreds of speeches, pamphlets, and articles. Driven by a desire for greater equality in German society, he introduced countless tax breaks for lower- and middle-class Germans, many of which remained in effect after 1945. Ordered by the Nazi labor minister in 1941 to narrow the gap in pensions between blue-collar and white-collar workers, Reinhardt responded simply, “Good!”
³²
He lowered the standards for entrance into various branches of the civil service and introduced mandatory supplemental training for Finance Ministry employees, taking the unprecedented step of founding a series of government-run financial “academies.”
³³
“Reinhardt may be an irritatingly pedantic little schoolmaster in his approach to problems,” Goebbels remarked, “but by and large he knows how to solve them.”
³⁴

The duo in charge of the Finance Ministry represented a marriage of opposites typical of National Socialism: the aristocratic and apolitical minister who had enjoyed the finest education and his parvenu deputy who had acquired his expertise as a conscientious, politically driven autodidact. Reinhardt saw himself as embodying progress toward a more egalitarian, classless, social welfare state. Von Krosigk, on the other hand, represented thousands of civil servants, military officers, scientists, and intellectuals who succeeded, working from the inside, in rationally codifying the nebulous and self-contradictory ideology of National Socialism.

Contrary to what is generally assumed today, and despite his intolerance of socialists, Jews, and nonconformists, the German people perceived Hitler not as a strident social divider and excluder but rather as a great integrator. The peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, which prohibited Austria and Germany from merging into one state, were widely seen as unjust. When Nazi Germany defied those treaties and incorporated Austria in March 1938, the dream of a Greater Germany, which had existed since the failed revolutions of 1848, was finally realized. The new German nation-state was not, of course, the liberal one envisioned in the nineteenth century, but its formation was nonetheless greeted with considerable popular enthusiasm. Though this period in German history is often interpreted as a deviation from “normal” development, in the late 1930s it was seen, equally broadly, as a difficult, even torturous process toward the national unification of a linguistic and cultural community, not unlike what had taken place in many other European states.

It was in the spirit of nationalist enthusiasm that the Judenstrasse (“Street of the Jews”) in the Spandau district of Berlin was renamed for Carl Schurz, a leading revolutionary of 1848. (A second street was named for Schurz’s fellow nationalist Gottfried Kinkel.) Hitler always defined himself not just as German chancellor but as leader of the entire German people, including ethnic Germans living outsid the boundaries of the state he ruled. On March 15,1938, Hitler proclaimed in Vienna: “As leader and imperial chancellor of the German nation, I announce before history the entry of my homeland into the German Reich.” A short time later in Frankfurt, the city that had hosted the failed German national assembly of 1848, Hitler presented himself as the man who had finally achieved the German people’s age-old dream: “The great work for which our forefathers struggled and shed their blood ninety years ago can now be considered complete.”
³⁵

The euphoria into which the nation was whipped only increased with Nazi Germany’s early military triumphs. Germany’s catastrophic defeat in World War I seemed to have been a blessing in disguise. Victory in 1918, many Germans felt, would merely have preserved the outmoded Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies, at the cost of millions of war casualties. (Hitler liked to refer to the Austro-Hungarian empire as “the Habsburg state-cadaver.”)
³⁶
Now it was the revolutionary young nation-state of Greater Germany that was achieving victory, led by a representative of the common people who had risen up through the social ranks. Suddenly the incalculable human suffering of World War I and the years that followed no longer seemed to have been in vain. Defeat was reinterpreted as a prelude to a grandiose triumph. In November 1939, when Hitler called together his generals to prepare for the blitzkrieg against France, he did so with the words “All in all, this represents the completion of the world war, not a specific campaign.”
³⁷

German troops had occupied Prague on March 15 of that year. Hermann Voss, a professor of anatomy who was later the recipient of numerous honors in Communist East Germany, noted in his diary: “Charles University—the oldest German university and the mother of the one in Leipzig—once again in German hands! It’s hard to believe. What a blow for the Slavs and what a boon for us. We are living in a great age and should feel privileged to experience such things. What does it matter if butter is in short supply, coffee is sometimes unavailable, or you sometimes have to do one thing or another that you don’t completely approve of? Weighed against such progress, these problems are laughably trivial.”
³⁸

Germany’s early series of military triumphs, combined with the appearance of economic recovery, decisively weakened opposition to Hitler on the home front. Protests against his policies by pragmatists like army chief of staff Ludwig Beck, Reichsbank director Hjalmar Schacht, and former Leipzig mayor Carl Friedrich Goerdeler faltered, their appeals to moderation and compromise no match for Hitler’s wildly popular invocation of a bold, historic transformation, of a high-stakes battle between polar opposites. The Third Reich was not a dictatorship maintained by force. Indeed, the Nazi leadership developed an almost fearful preoccupation with the mood of the populace, which they monitored carefully, devoting considerable energy and resources toward fulfilling consumer desires, even to the detriment of the country’s rearmament program.
³⁹

To put the level of Nazi state coercion of its citizens into perspective: Communist East Germany would later employ 190,000 official surveillance experts and an equal number of “unofficial collaborators” to watch over a populace of 17 million, while the Gestapo in 1937 had just over 7,000 employees, including bureaucrats and secretarial staff. Together with a famaller force of security police, they sufficed to keep tabs on more than 60 million people. Most Germans simply did not need to be subjected to surveillance or detention. By the end of 1936, four years after the Nazis had become Germany’s largest political party and once their initial period of terror and violence against opponents was over, only 4,761 people—some of whom were chronic alcoholics and career criminals—were incarcerated in the country’s concentration camps.

Although the financial basis for Germany’s economic upswing was precarious, Hitler’s popularity grew with each seemingly effortless triumph, soon spreading beyond the party rank and file and further undermining the opposition. By 1938, what Mussolini aptly called
democrazia totalitaria
had been established. After many years of civil strife, class hatred, and political obstructionism, Germans were united in their yearning for popular community.

In his memoirs, my grandfather Wolfgang Aly described his experience of World War I at great length. The recipient of a doctorate in Germanic linguistics (his father had overruled his wish to become a mathematician), he had served in the war as an artillery commander. In 1917, a particularly capable staff sergeant caught his attention. “He was entirely without fear,” my grandfather wrote. “I wanted to promote him to senior officer and ordered him to report to me. When he learned of my plan, he answered: ‘My father is a tailor. I’d rather stay a junior officer. I don’t fit in with that sort of company.’ Nonetheless,” the account concluded, “he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.”
⁴⁰
This social dynamic, set in motion during World War I, was taken up and exploited by National Socialism. The party appealed to thousands of men who had left their class identification behind them in the grime of trench warfare. It drew in left-leaning blue-collar workers, artisans, and office workers who hoped their children would enjoy upward social mobility. They were joined by those who had already profited from the educational reforms of the Weimar Republic and wanted to continue their rise in status. These groups sought not a new class dictatorship but rather the sort of meritocracy we take for granted today: a society in which the circumstances of one’s birth have relatively little influence on one’s eventual career and social standing.

THE NAZIS’ racist teachings have been read solely as encouragement for hatred, violence, and murder, but for millions of Germans their appeal lay in the promise of real equality within the ethnic community. Externally, Nazi ideology emphasized differences; internally, it smoothed them over. Hitler demanded “the highest degree of social solidarity and maximum educational opportunities for every member of the German race; toward others, however, [we assume] the standpoint of the absolute master.”
⁴¹
For all those who legally belonged to the German racial community—about 95 percent of the population—social divides became ever smaller. For many people, the regime’s aim of leveling out class distinctions was realized in the Hitler Youth, the National Labor Service, the major party organizations, and ultimately even in the Wehrmacht. The Nazis’ fondness for uniforms is today seen as a manifestation of its militarism. But uniforms, whether worn by schoolchildren or Boy Scouts or sports teams, are also a way of obscuring differences between the well-off and their less fortunate peers.

The goal of reducing class differences also motivated the Nazis to launch, between 1939 and 1942, a series of increasingly ambious plans to settle Germans in Eastern Europe. Designed to give Germans more living space, greater access to natural resources, and better opportunities for self-advancement, the most extreme proposal envisioned forcibly relocating 50 million Slavs to Siberia. (For years, the German Research Foundation also supported the development of technocratic plans for the slaughter of millions of people. Funds for research in this area were still allocated in the Nazis’ final budget for the fiscal year 1945-46.) In domestic terms, the General Eastern Settlement Plan was promoted as a driving force behind an assurgent lower-class movement in Germany. Party officials were well aware of the plan’s advantages on the home front. Himmler spoke of a “socialism of good blood.” Hitler declared enthusiastically: “We can take our poor workers’ families from Thuringia and the coal mining mountains and give them vast stretches of land.” The German Labor Front hoped that in this way “at least 700,000 economically unviable, small agrarian enterprises can be gotten rid of.”
⁴²
Academic studies were commissioned to look into “settler reserves” within the German population, and all made reference to Marx’s term for excess labor, “the industrial reserve army.” These were precisely the sorts of people who in an earlier period would have emigrated to the United States, driven by poverty.

By 1942 German children were staging imaginary gunfights on the “black soil” of central Russia, while hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ wives dreamed of owning country estates in Ukraine. Even Heinrich Böll, who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 and who was certainly not one of Hitler’s willing executioners, wrote to his parents on December 31,1943, from a frontline hospital: “I long to return to the Rhine and to Germany, yet I often also think of the possibility of a colonial existence here in Eastern Europe once the war has been won.”
⁴³
Children’s writers Thea Haupt and Use Mau conceived of a primer “for beginning readers” that would “acquaint small children with the ideas behind the settlement plan and transfer the cowboys-and-Indians romanticism [of the American West] to Eastern Europe.” They concocted the following flights of fancy: “Let us now borrow Tom Thumb’s magic boots and take a walk through a foreign land. We’ll need them if we hope to get there. . . . Here we are in the fruitful terrain of black soil. . . . The corn rustles alongside the wheat and rye.”
⁴⁴

This land of milk and honey in Eastern Europe was to be conquered not for the benefit of landed Prussian Junkers and powerful industrialists but to provide ordinary people with a real-world utopia.

Utopian dreams represented a pointed contrast to Germans’ experience of World War I. Three memories were particularly traumatic: the food shortages caused by the British naval blockade, the devaluation of the currency, and the civil unrest that followed defeat. More than 400,000 people starved to death during the war—a number that does not include those who died prematurely of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases made worse by malnutrition.
⁴⁵
Currency devaluation made runaway inflation a part of daily life. On average, the cost of food doubled in Germany during the war, and in isolated parts of the country, the rise was even more dramatic.
⁴⁶
In the absence of effective government priccontrol mechanisms, inflation placed most of the economic burden on ordinary people, few of whom possessed savings or material assets. Price rises continued to torment Germany after the war. The hyperinflation of 1923 led to the de facto impoverishment of the nationalistically inclined middle classes.

In many Germans’ memories of the two final years of World War I, the humiliation of defeat was combined with a hatred of those perceived to have profited from the people’s desperation. The popular view held that traitors to the nation had stirred up discontent and defeatism among an otherwise patriotic public. What else could explain Germany’s failure to achieve victory on the Western Front, after it had defeated Russia and its other enemies in the East? Only after internal unity had collapsed, many believed, was the fatherland finally subdued on the battlefield, a calamity that led to the trauma of the communist uprising of November 1918. Hitler deftly exploited this widespread sentiment. Point 12 of the National Socialist Party platform read: “With respect to the enormous sacrifice of life and property that every war demands of the populace, wartime profiteering must be considered a crime committed against the people. We therefore demand that all profits from war, without exception, be confiscated.”